arXiv Computation and Language

Compliance, Capability, and Conflict: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs under System Messages

arXiv:2608. 19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production deployments of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly rely on system messages to govern model behavior.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Video-IFBench: Evaluating Instruction Following of Multimodal LLMs in Video Understanding Scenarios

Video-IFBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) follow user-specified instructions in video understanding tasks. It introduces an instruction taxonomy with four templates—single-task, multi-task, selection, and nested—covering 32 task types and 39 constraint categories that span semantic and format requirements. The benchmark was built using a semi-automatic pipeline that combines MLLMs, programmatic processing, and human verification, producing 1.5K samples, and a large-scale evaluation of over 20 recent MLLMs shows that instruction following remains difficult, especially for complex constraints and conditional structures.

By Hongbo Liu, Peixian Chen, Sihan Liu, Peiyuan Zhang, Kai Zou, Dian Zheng, Xiaoxing Hu, Yuhao Dong, Mengdan Zhang, Yunhang Shen, Haoyu Cao, Wei Liu, Weibo Gu, Xing Sun, Shengjie Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

VCIFBench: Evaluating Complex Instruction Following for Video Understanding

Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video understanding, yet existing benchmarks largely rely on simple prompts and provide limited evidence about whether models can satisfy explicit output constraints. We introduce VCIFBench, a benchmark for evaluating complex instruction following in video understanding.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

CCTU: A Benchmark for Tool Use under Complex Constraints

CCTU is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to use tools under complex constraints. It includes 200 test cases that average seven constraint types and 4,700‑token prompts, covering resource, behavior, toolset, and response dimensions. An executable validation module performs step‑level checks, and nine state‑of‑the‑art LLMs were tested, revealing that none exceed a 20% task completion rate when strict constraints are enforced, with frequent violations and limited self‑refinement.

By Junjie Ye, Guoqiang Zhang, Wenjie Fu, Zelin Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv AI
Jun 26

MMGist: A Comprehensive Multimodal Benchmark for 2027

arXiv:2606. 22437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We conduct a systematic study of 18 widely used vision-language benchmarks and identify three major issues: 1) many items do not rely on visual cues and therefore fail to effectively measure multimodal understanding; 2) many items are already close to performance saturation for current LVLMs, which limits their discriminative power; 3) a small number of anomalous items affect the reliability of evaluation results.

By Wenzhen Yuan, Jiacheng Ruan, Wutao Xiong, Chengping Zhao, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Do You See What You Draw? A Semantic Closed-Loop Framework for Holistic Evaluation of Unified Multimodal Models

As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge. Current evaluation protocols predominantly treat generative and discriminative capabilities as separate tasks, leaving a gap in system-level evaluation for unified multimodal models (UMMs).

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Same Semantics, Different Outcome: On the Modality Robustness of Multimodal LLMs under Knowledge Conflict

The paper investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle conflicting evidence presented in text, image, or both forms. Across 13 MLLMs and two datasets, the authors find that models are not robust to knowledge conflict: they tend to accept contradictory image evidence more readily than contradictory text, and when both modalities conflict the preference is arbitrary, depending on input order, model, and dataset. The instability degrades multimodal retrieval-augmented generation and can be exploited by adversarial attacks, while simple mitigation techniques such as prompting, steering, and direct preference optimization largely fail, with supervised fine‑tuning offering only moderate improvement.

By Jungyeon Lee, Yejin Yoon, Taeuk Kim